This month on Ask the Experts, award-winning landscape and nature photographer Robert Knight is taking your questions on  landscape photography, shooting RAW,  handling a variety of environments and conditions, workflow and image storage. 

To submit your question, view the new Ask the Experts page on PDNOnline.

A member of the San Disk Extreme Team, Knight has won many prestigious awards for his landscape and wildlife photography, including the "Wild Places" award in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and editorial awards from Nature's Best and National Geographic. His work has taken him to Antarctica with its cold, wet air, and across Africa, with intense, dry heat. A gallery of his wildlife images from all over the world can be seen on our Ask the Experts page.

You can email your questions to editor@pdnonline.com. We'll screen them, forward them to Knight,  and post his answers and comments  throughout the month.

Photo by Genevieve de Manio

Barbara Kinney and Genevieve De Manio were hired to act as Chelsea Clinton’s “official” photographers at the former first daughter’s wedding in Rhinebeck, New York,
this past weekend. Unfortunately, they can’t talk to anyone about the experience.

(more…)

Rallies were held in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia
and in several international cities this weekend to mark the one-year anniversary of the arrest by freelance
photographer and journalist Shane Bauer and his friends Sarah Shourd and Joshua
Fattal by Iranian authorities. 
They were arrested July 31, 2009 while, according to their friends and
family,  they were hiking across
Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran has accused them of illegally crossing the border into
Iran and of being spies for the U.S.

 On Friday the US State Department Issued a statement saying
that the release of the three US citizens is “long overdue and their continued
detention is unjustifiable.”

Bauer, a journalist whose writing and photography has been
published in Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation,
Christian Science Monitor,  was
based in Damascus. He met Shourd and Fattal while the three were
attending University of California at Berkeley, and they had been living and working in Syria before their backpacking trip. 

The New York Times reports that the mothers of the three prisoners spoke at a rally held Friday outside the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York to demand their children's release. The mothers were allowed a visit with the three in May but have had little contact since.

The day after news reports that experts had authenticated glass plate negatives –bought for $45 at a garage sale in Pasadena– as the work of Ansel Adams, dealers of Adams’ prints are casting doubts on the negatives’ authenticity and estimated market value. 

Bill Turnage, managing director of the Ansel Adams Rights Trust, which holds the copyright to Adams’ images and licenses his name and work, tells the AP that he’s considered legal action against Beverly Hills art dealer David W. Streets for using Adams’ name to promote the sale of the negatives. “It’s an unfortunate fraud,” says Turnage. 

Turnage also disputes the value of $200 million which Streets has set on the negatives. A print Adams made sold for $722,500 at auction last year, but Turnage insists the value of such a work is in Adams’ printing techniques, not the negative. “"Ansel interpreted the negative very heavily," he says. "Each print is a work of art."

It may be impossible for anyone to say definitely who created the negatives in question. Rick Norsigian, who bought the collection in 2000, and his lawyer, Arnold Peter, have assembled experts who have declared “"with a high degree of probability" that they were created by Ansel Adams. These experts include art historians, a meteorologist who compared the locations shown in the negatives with some of Adams’ favorite sites,  and handwriting experts who said the notes on the envelopes appear to have been written by Adams’ wife, Virginia.  

On the other side, Turnage and others who have dealt in Adams work and protected his legacy claim that evidence is flimsy at best.  

Matthew Adams, the photographer’s grandson and the head of the Ansel Adams Gallery in San Francisco, viewed the negatives last fall. He says, “There is no real, hard evidence. I’m skeptical.”  He says it’s unlikely that his grandfather, who taught in Pasadena during the 1940s, would have misplaced 5,000 negatives or left them in a warehouse. "Ansel was very meticulous about his negatives," says his grandson, who notes that the photographer lost much of his work in a studio fire in 1937. "He kept them in a bank vault in San Francisco after the fire."

Regarding one of the weaker pieces of evidence, Matthew Adams tells AP that he doubts the notes on the envelopes were written by his grandmother because the names of Yosemite sites are misspelled. "She grew up in Yosemite. She was an intelligent, well-read woman. I find it hard to believe she would mispell those names," he says. 

 Boxes of glass plate negatives, which a California man bought at a Pasadena garage sale ten years ago for $45, have been authenticated by photography experts who insist they are the work of Ansel Adams. Appraiser and art dealer David W. Streets, who will be displaying the plates tonight in his gallery in Beverly Hills, says the images, taken between 1919 and the 1930s, told CNN that they represent “a missing link of Ansel Adams and history and his career.” He estimates the collection is worth $200 million.

According to CNN, Rick Norsigian of Fresno, California found the boxes at a garage sale in 2000, and thought they looked familiar. The owner of the boxes (who is probably rather upset with himself as he reads all the press reports about this find) said he had found them in warehouse salvage sale in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He asked Norsigian for $70; they haggled, and Norsigian bought them for $45. 

Norsigian then consulted  art historians, handwriting experts (who say the notes on the manilla envelopes holding the plates were written by Virginia Adams, the photographer’s wife) and photo expert Robert Moeller, who spent six months studying the negatives and determined that the silver tarnish left on some plates dated them to the 1920s.

Adams historians had believed the negatives were destroyed in a darkroom fire in 1937. According to another historian Norsigian consulted, Patrick Alt, Adams taught a class in Pasadena in the early 1940s, and may have brought the glass negatives along as a teaching tool. How they ended up in a warehouse, however, is still unknown.

Streets estimates that Norsigian’s finds may be worth $200 million.  In June, a single Adams print, “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park,” sold for $722,500, setting a new auction record for an Adams print.

(Photo courtesy of David W. Streets via CNN)

A wedding photographer who was taking a portrait of a bride and groom atop a cliff near Wied Iz-Zurrieq on the south coast of Malta fell into the sea during the photo session.

According to the timesofmalta.com, 57-year-old Mario Agius, was taking photos of the happy couple when he slipped and tumbled off the cliff. The groom apparently dived in after him and helped pull the photographer onto a nearby boat but Agius died that same night of his injuries at the hospital.

Remember way back when a wedding portrait translated into an awkward pose of the bride and groom up against a nondescript wall? It may have been boring but at least it was safe and everyone lived. Tragically, an Italian photographer in Sicily did not survive after being accidentally shot while having his bride and groom pose with guns for a unique wedding day image.

According to an item in the Daily Mail (http://bit.ly/d4z67z) photographer Calogero Scimea asked both the bride's and the groom's parents if they had any guns to use as props and after some hunting rifles were supplied, one went off accidentally and hit Scimea in the head and killed him. It is apparently common in Southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, for guns to be fired at family events or festivals as part of the celebration.

The tragedy occurred right before the couple were about to head off to their local church near Palermo for their wedding ceremony, which was immediately cancelled. Palermo police spokesman Colonel Teo Luzi told reporters that Scimea was only there as a favor to the originally booked photographer who pulled out before the event due to illness.

The police are reporting that the guns were legally held but there is speculation over who owned the one that killed Scimea, the bride's parents or the groom's, as well as who was holding it when it went off. "What we are trying to establish is if the gun went off as it was
being handled by the photographer or if it went off as it was handed to
him but noone is being very talkative," said Luzi.

Nandita Raman and Elizabeth Moreno took home the first prizes in the Project and Work-in-Progress categories, respectively, of the 2010 Daylight / Center for Documentary Studies Photo Awards last Saturday.

Moreno's project, titled "Far from the Cities, Close to Earth" explores the lives of Mexican "rancheros" in Baja California, and their struggle to maintain traditional values and a sustainable lifestyle in the face of land development and low wages. Information about Raman's project was not immediately available.

The winning projects, which were selected by a jury of photo editors, gallery directors, and photographers from hundreds of submissions, will both be featured in print in Daylight Magazine and CDS's news magazine Document, as well as online and in exhibitions at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Raman will also receive $1,000 for exhibition related expenses, and will be featured in a multimedia Daylight podcast.

Jurors also commended Rachel Barrett, Priya Kambli, Jan Lieske, and Daniel Stier in the Project category, and  Erica Allen, Paula McCartney, Martin Roemers, and Monika Sziladi in the Work-in-Progress category. The Center for Documentary Studies will feature their work in a group exhibition.

Multimedia galleries of the award-winning submissions and details about the exhibitions will be available on the Daylight blog in the next few weeks. More information about the contest is at Daylight's Web site.

                                                                                                               –by Eli Meixler

Since one of its oil wells blew out in the Gulf of Mexico more than three months ago, BP has demonstrated a certain aversion to the truth about the disaster and its consequences.

Against that backdrop, The Washington Post has reported that Gawker and other blogs have so far identified at least three BP handout photos that were digitally altered. For instance, in one image from the inside of BP's Houston command center, a staff photographer pasted images onto some blank video screens. In another, a helicopter parked on the deck of a ship was made to look as if it was flying over the Gulf of Mexico.

After the altered images came to light, a BP spokesperson posted the originals for public scrutiny, explained what alterations had been made, and said BP had instructed the staff to "refrain from doing this in the future."

Caveat emptor.

Photographer and cameraman Wes Skiles, who explored, mapped, and filmed caves around the world for three decades, died Wednesday afternoon while on a dive near Palm Beach, Florida. He was 53.

Diving companions found Skiles unconscious on the ocean floor near a reef, shortly after he had signaled to them that he was going to the surface for more film. His companions pulled him to the surface and tried to revive him while rushing him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The cause of his death is unknown. A medical examiner will conduct an autopsy, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Skiles was a long-time contributor to both National Geographic magazine and National Geographic Television, At the time of his death, Skiles had just finished shooting a scientific expedition related to marine life off the Florida coast on an assignment for NGTV. “The shoot had wrapped, but he stayed on with the researchers” to do more shooting, says National Geographic spokesperson Beth Foster.

Skiles also shot the cover story for the current issue of National Geographic, about the dangerous submarine caves of the Bahamas called blue holes.

"He set a standard for underwater photography, cinematography and exploration that is unsurpassed. It was an honor to work with him, and he will be deeply missed," said National Geographic editor-in-chief Chris Johns in a statement on the publisher’s Web site.

Skiles grew up exploring the caves of northern Florida. On its Web site, National Geographic credits him with developing and refining a technique for using multiple strobes to dramatically light the underwater environment of caves.

He was also the creator, director and cinematographer of the PBS series, 'Water's Journey' and his production company, Karst Productions of High Springs, Florida, directed and filmed all the underwater scenes in a feature film titled 'The Cave'.

He is survived by his wife, Terri, and two children.